Benchmarking Our Tool

Before we start thinking about improving the performance of our tools or programs, we first need to determine what the current status is and define a baseline for comparison.

For this exercise, we’ll state that performance means how long the tool takes to process its workload. Perhaps it’s currently good enough, but we don’t know. To determine the current state, we need to measure it.

Time command

In the Linux/Unix world, the quickest way to determine how fast our applications works is by using the time command. The time command executes the application and prints out how long it took to run. For example, to measure how long our tool takes to process data from the two test files in the testdata directory, we run this command: